Dedicated to the Development of Palliative Care

Menu

Tag Archives: analgesia

The POEM shows promise for rapidly identifying patients’ opioid-related knowledge gaps and expectations. Correcting misunderstandings and gaps could result in safer use of opioids in a clinical care setting.

Topical administration of anesthetics and analgesics can allow for the efficient, painless delivery of medications that may reduce systemic side effects associated with the medication while providing clinical advantages over injected or oral administration for the same clinical situation. Topical administration of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), lidocaine, capsaicin, and other agents is useful for a range of conditions including acute and chronic musculoskeletal pain.

Oxycodone is frequently initiated for non-cancer pain without first trialing other analgesics. This highlights the need for prescribing practices to be reviewed in light of increasing concerns about adverse drugs events and death due to oxycodone, particularly in older people.

Among women with mild or moderate pain, older women were less likely than younger women to receive either form of pain treatment, but among women with more severe pain (pain score 8 or more), older women were more likely than younger women to receive pain treatment. Further, among women with mild or moderate pain, the oldest patients (aged 85 and older) were the least likely to receive any analgesic or an opioid, but among women with severe pain the oldest patients were the most likely to receive treatment. Further research is needed to assess the generalizability of this interaction between age, gender, and pain severity on pain treatment.

The addition of lidocaine 5 % patches is effective in the short term for the treatment of neuropathic cancer pain accompanied by allodynia, whether deriving from a painful scar or chest wall tumor. These findings need to be confirmed by randomized controlled trials with larger samples.

The vascular risks of high-dose diclofenac, and possibly ibuprofen, are comparable to coxibs, whereas high-dose naproxen is associated with less vascular risk than other NSAIDs. Although NSAIDs increase vascular and gastrointestinal risks, the size of these risks can be predicted, which could help guide clinical decision making.

From current evidence, although all BTCP medications provided pain relief within the time frames assessed, transmucosal fentanyl medications achieved a greater level of pain relief in a shorter time frame than placebo or oral morphine.